Pioneering new ideas of life and health in the 21st Century. The flagship publication for the most innovative and authoritative writer/speaker/instructor on Understanding Conditioning. While he started out like all his friends wondering how to make exercise harder, his breakthrough idea was making exercise as easy as possible -- and therefore inevitable and unavoidable -- as the only effective lifelong strategy for those activities.

Friday, January 08, 2016

Everything You Know Isn't True Anymore

Maybe it never was. But ideas have a way of catching on -- despite the realities it purports to represent. There is obviously what is happening out there -- but what we see and think of them, may be something else entirely. It's not that it might never have been true before, or at any time, but it might not be true now -- for the best we know. There is always a better truth that supplants all we previously knew. So the proper question is not what is the truth for all time, but what is the truth, the best we know now -- and we can begin that inquiry by asking, "How do we know, what we think we know?"More often than not, what we know, is what somebody else wanted us to know -- and not necessarily if it was the truth, depending on their motives and agendas. That is, most of what we know, is what its promoters and advertisers would like us to know -- for their own advantage, and not necessarily our own. That is why it is best not just to hear one perspective on the matter, but others as well, until the weight of evidence and testimony seems to mesh with everything else we know to be true in the world -- even if it is something new and different.Thus it is not enough to know it has been an old or ancient knowledge that makes it valid -- but whether can be proven in the present moment -- and each experience (experiment) thereafter -- until there is a better truth and explanation -- which is always evolving to be better. That alone is the hope for the future -- and not simply the young, rich or powerful. Thus the great advantage, is finding the greater truth -- that is so much more than simply any single truth, or the sum of the parts. The greater (integrating) truth, multiplies all the previous truths one had discovered -- and not simply adds to it.Such increments, mean very little -- in the great scheme of things. It is only a little truth, and not a great one -- that transforms one's world to something meaningfully different. That is the difference between the thrill of discovery, and the agony of merely doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Real change doesn't happen that way. That is the reason things stay the same, no matter how much we would like to change it.But when you do something significantly different then everything changes -- because it is what matters, and makes the difference. That is the kind of conditioning very useful to have because it makes improvement always possible -- and not all the effort that doesn't make a difference, or in fact, reinforces the status quo and is the probable cause of one's deteriorating condition.In this way, one is always finding out many things -- whether it is the truth or not, and that is also useful to know -- whether one wants to or not, because then they don't have to go through the trouble of learning it. It is theirs for the taking. It is a convenient truth -- or falsehood, that one learns without effort and waste of time -- just going about one's business. Many are determined not to see the true or false -- but only what they want to see, and that is to waste all one sees and does -- in the course of their living. That would be paying attention -- to every present moment -- without regard to how they would like it other to be.Those are the great lessons of life -- learning what is happening -- and not just working to change it into something else -- regardless of learning what it is already. The powerful mind and life, is not those that can change something into what it isn't, but that which can fully appreciate what it is, as it is -- for that is the greatness and totality of the world. At all times, something is already happening -- and never that nothing is happening, and so one has to make it -- out of nothing. That manner of thinking, requires a lot of energy and resources -- to create something out of nothing, or to render something into nothing.One of the hardest things to accept about the world, is that there is always change; that is the nature of the world, and universe. The world is not static, unchanging, and one can move with it, or against it -- with great struggle and no guarantee or even chance of success. But many will be given no options of anything to do besides that which will guarantee them failure -- at least so far. There is always the hope that one will be the first to succeed -- in doing what has always failed before, but what else is one to do?Those possibilities have to be created -- and tried, if they make greater sense to do so. Frequently, that comes about because there is no hope otherwise. One simply has to do what makes sense -- rather than to go down with what is not working. At such times, something new is discovered -- and limits that were thought to be physical and immutable, are seen in a new light of being only the imaginary -- and not the only thing possible, and everything else hopeless. There is another way.